The New, Bo-taxed, Socialist Face of Health Care

Posted on Aug 4, 2009

comedycentral.com

Does President Obama have it in for senior citizens and Sean Hannity? What’s to become of “high-fructose families” under our socialist president’s alarming new health care system? Stephen Colbert explores all this and more while keeping his enraged forehead remarkably still.

Although having a socialist model of health care system may seem appealing to the large mass of people, it’s very difficult for the government. It’s much to expensive to give everyone free health acre no matter the social contribution and, in my opinion, it’s not even fare. Since in this moment, many medical institutions are underfunded, I believe it would be inappropriate for the authorities to spend even more money on a transformation process that will bring nothing good. While I was an intern in the drug rehab centers in New Jersey I have seen first hand how hard it to get by with lack of funds and how much work you put in to compensate the lack of personnel! These should be the priorities on the health system!

America and the WWF (World Wrestling Federation) are going to merge and become the the new “World Order Wrestling International Enterprise” or WOWIE for short.
The questions is:
Will we notice a difference?

liecatcher, thanks for those stats—they ought to be central to any discussion about health care reform. As for your proscription for health, I’d suggest that a glass of red wine with dinner is good for the heart and soul. I caught the end of a discussion on public radio the other day and I didn’t catch the speaker’s name, but he was a nutritionist who claimed that statins (anti-cholesterol drugs) were dangerous and will result in massive liver damage, and the need for transplants.

The French believe the same about statins and suggest moderate exercise as an alternative, along with a balanced diet. I think the Greeks had it right—moderation in all things.

As for the American health care system…now that would be a great idea.

America is only developed country without health care for its citisens…There is plenty mony for two wars and nuclear woepen and NASA projects but no mony for the people….I am living in HUMANE CARING society in which every citisen have free doctors education and mony for the food,yes for food and renth supstity In America you simply die and you are homelessI do not have any regard for AMERICAN WALUES

The U.S. economy depends on continual warfare now, which means money goes to any kind of weapon production—in this case, Big Pharma, or drugs or stem cell-related products, that could be more devastating than nuclear weapons. That is why we will not have single-payor or “government-payor” care anytime soon. This is a hot area because of recent discoveries in neuroscience. Check out Thomas Metzinger’s “The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self,” (Basic Books, 2009):

When neuroscience discovers the sufficient neural correlates for willing, desiring, and executing an action, we will be able to cause, amplify and modulate the conscious experience of will. It will become clear that the ACTUAL causes of our actions often have very little to do with what the conscious self tells us.

We now have an information jungle that is increasing each day. It already is reconfiguring our brain. Perhaps our body perception will change as we learn to control multiple avatars in multiple virtual realities.

We already use the the Internet as part of our self-model. We use it for exernal memory storage , as a cognitive prosthesis and for emotional autoregulation.

A related problem is management of our attention. The ability to attend to our environment, to our own feelings to those of others as naturally evolved feature of the human braing. Attention is a finaite commodity. Our brains can generate only a limited amount of attention each day.

The advertisement and entertainment industries are attacking our foundations for experience and trying to rob us of our scarce attention. New insight s into the human mind by cognitive and brain science “neuromarketing” is one of the ugly new buzzwords. If I am right that consciousness is the space of attentional agency and if it is also true that the experience of controling and sustaining your focus of attention is one of the deeper layers of phenomenal (experience) selfhood, then we are witnessing not only an organized attack on the space of consciousness per se, but a form of depersonalization. New media may create a new form of waking consciousness that resembles weakly subjective states—a mixture of dreaming, dementia, intoxication and infantilization.
Lives can be ruined because we have not done our homework. The price of denial may rise. Many new psychoactive substances of the hallucinogen-type—such as 2C-B (“Venus” or “Nexus”) or 2C-T-7 (Blue Mystic” or “T7”0 are out on the illegal market without any clinical testing; their numbers will continue to increase.
And that’s just the old problems the homework we never did. In our ultrafast, ever more competitive and RUTHLESS modern societies, very few people are seeking deeper spritual experience. They want alterness, concentration, emotional stability, and charisma—things thatr lead to success. In the rich societies of the world, people are growing older than ever before—and they want not just quantity but QUALITY of life. BIG PHARMA knows this. Everybody has heard of modafinil, and perhaps that is already with us in the Iraq war; but there are at least 40 new molecules in the pipeline. There is hope and alarmism is not the right attitude, but the technology is not going away.
Big Pharma, circumventing the border between legal and illegal substances is quietly developing new compounds; they know that cognitive enhancers will reap them hefty future profits from “nonmedical use.” For instance, Cephalon, maker of modafinil has said that 90 percent of prescriptions currently are for off-label used. The spread of Internet pharmacies has given them new ways for distribution and new tools for mass testing potential long-term effects.
Modern neuroethics will have to careat a new approach to drug policy: The key question is: Which brain states should be legal? http://apocalypse-blues.typepad.com/